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Squaremeal Review of
Lake Road Kitchen

SquareMeal

‘Hyper-seasonal, climatically local cooking’ is the name of the game here, which means a tuned-in zeitgeist-hugging amalgam of ‘preserving and pickling’, ‘working with nature’ and so on. It should come as no surprise that James Cross cooked at world-beating Noma before deciding to shake up touristy Ambleside with his radical cuisine. Expect wild pickings and indigenous ingredients galore, all combined in revelatory dishes with lots of new Nordic echoes: meaty snails are dressed with a fearsome green miso made in-house from peas and beans; a tartare of Norwegian fjord trout encircles a confit duck-egg yolk; a sweet caramelised scallop is enlivened with fermented apple purée and dill oil. Elsewhere, beef carcases are dry-aged for up to 215 days! To finish, a plate of oh-so-pink preserved rhubarb and buttermilk ice cream is garnished with a seed-speckled linseed cracker that looks like something out of Tate Modern. LRK is a modest no-frills space with wooden planking on the walls, bare tables and an open-to-view kitchen – it’s also the kind of eatery where you’re expected to pour your own wine (sourced from Northern Europe, naturally). Nevertheless, we think it’s stunning.

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SquareMeal’s Best Restaurants in the UK 2017 is compiled using votes from our annual survey, last conducted in spring 2017. Thousands of readers took part and the results were moderated by SquareMeal’s editor and his nationwide team of professional reviewers. The UK survey does not include any restaurants in London. Click here for the full list of SquareMeal’s Best Restaurants in the UK.